


Welcome to Nargothrond

by RaisingCaiin



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Inspired by Welcome to Night Vale, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-29
Updated: 2018-09-29
Packaged: 2019-07-20 07:42:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16132757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RaisingCaiin/pseuds/RaisingCaiin
Summary: It is a hidden cavern kingdom where the sun shines not, the moon has been blocked, and strange lights dance in dark corners while its denizens pretend they cannot see them. Someday we will learn what the lights are trying to tell us, and then we will wish that we never tried to learn at all.Welcome to Nargothrond.





	Welcome to Nargothrond

**Author's Note:**

  * For [erlkoenig](https://archiveofourown.org/users/erlkoenig/gifts).



> for erlkoenig, an amazing and inspirational author, and their prompt about witchcrafting this pairing into being

_It is a hidden cavern kingdom where the sun shines not, the moon has been blocked, and strange lights dance in dark corners while its denizens pretend they cannot see them. Someday we will learn what the lights are trying to tell us, and then we will wish that we never tried to learn at all._

_Welcome to Nargothrond._

~ ~ ~

Curufinwë does not know where the letter comes from or how it came to be on his desk, but that is fine. Understandable, even. Letters are querulous, quarrelsome things, created in the dead of night when a writer’s fingers are awake but his mind is not. Letters are never meant to be read anyway.

 A letter is only a prop, proof that someone tried to say something. What they were actually trying to say is of no significance whatsoever.

So Curufinwë does not worry – much – to see a letter in his own hand, atop his own desk, addressed to someone whose scribbled name he does not bother to stop and read.

It is an unimportant name. It must be, if it is on a letter, which is an unimportant piece of paper. So Curufinwë sweeps the unimportant paper with its unreadable and unimportant name into the fire.

The paper cries as if it is being devoured and its cry sounds very much like a name he should recognize, but coincidences do happen. The universe is lazy sometimes, even here in Nargothrond.

 

~ ~ ~

_Some nights a stranger speaks with Curufinwë’s voice. He uses Curufinwë’s emphases; he has Curufinwë’s intonation and he voices Curufinwë’s words, the blood that he draws dripping from Curufinwë’s tongue. He is a charming one, this stranger, and when he scoffs or scorns or sighs his breath rises from Curufinwë’s lungs._

_Curufinwë thinks perhaps he_ is _this stranger._

_He cannot know if he is not._

 

~ ~ ~

Curufinwë’s brother is a hunter. But it is not from Tyelkormo that Curufinwë learned how to spear a heart, prepare it for eating.

In fact, Tyelkormo had flinched away from him, eyes wide and terrified, and nothing that Curufinwë could say in explanation sufficed to bring him back.

Curufinwë never tried to explain again.

Hunters do not understand excess. Hunters do not flinch unless you are cruel. And what could be more cruel, more excessive, than words?

Well, not using words, of course. The cold hard silence, the eye that glances and then glazes. And Curufinwë has never been needlessly cruel.

And so in Nargothrond his mouth becomes a knife, feeling for the edge of the ribs and the spaces in between them. Ribs are strange, good but strange: people seem to imagine that they are some sort of protection, armor for those sleek and trembling organs within that make life possible. But sometimes the heart just wants to come out, and Curufinwë’s bloodletting words let it.

He seeks a way past the ribs; he pries them apart. Puncturing the most vulnerable parts of a heart keeps it bleeding, soft; tender. Open. Lets it escape, and say what it means, if only Curufinwë can coax it past the ribs.

Which he cannot always do. Beneath his tongue, his knife, Tyelkormo flinches: Tyelperinquar smiles in pain and shakes his head. Findaráto fences with him, his own edged tongue at first a novel match and then a tiresome foil. The king’s guards alternately snarl or quake, and the Old Ghost who stands at Findaráto’s right elbow never acknowledges any blow.

Perhaps Turukáno had been his whetstone, for Curufinwë’s grinding against him had never changed Turukáno. Indeed, he had only ever made Curufinwë’s own edges shine the brighter.

 

~ ~ ~ ~

_And now, the weather._

_The weather does not exist in Nargothrond. The caves keep out everything – the rain, the storms, the frost, the very air we need to breathe. Do not worry, the guards promise – you’ll get used to it. Not breathing is a small price to pay for safety. If you cannot breathe, eventually you will die, and then there is nothing you ever need fear again._

_What kind of small-minded person would deny their neighbors this comfort, this certainty? Think of the children, and stop trying to open the gates! You’ll let the weather in._

~ ~ ~

“Being at peace does not necessarily mean healing, Curufinwë,” Findaráto tells him, gently. “I am sure that Turukáno is well, wherever he is.”

But gentleness is its own special hell – far worse than a knife, and the ichor that it draws drains far more painfully than blood. And even now, Curufinwë is not so needlessly cruel that he would be gentle in return.

“Fine words for a king whose slave still waits on him in death, Ingoldo.”

“Hmmm?”

And Curufinwë realizes with a start that Findaráto cannot see the Old Ghost standing steady at his right hand. This phantom of a Man never looks to Curufinwë, or to the guard at Findaráto’s left hand, who is struggling not to bare his teeth: the Old Ghost only ever has eyes for the king. He follows every move that Findaráto makes as if his gaze has been magnetized, and Findaráto is the pole to which he is drawn. He is without expression. He appears garbed in the same bed-clothes he must have died in.

Curufinwë salvages his salvo. “I said. Fine words for a king who followed the same sort of visions to what will be his death, Ingoldo.”

“Hah!” Findaráto laughs this off. He laughs everything off. It is the other cruelest and most terrible thing about him. “And yet I am not dead, cousin, and neither is Turukáno!”

Unbidden, a letter of smoke and ash comes to Curufinwë’s mind. He banishes it as quickly as it came.

 “So you say. But it will happen soon enough, no matter what you do.”

“Are you threatening me, cousin?” Findaráto asks cheerfully. He even leans forward, anticipatory, hoping for a dare.

“No need,” Curufinwë tells him. “These walls that you have built around yourself will do the job more completely than I ever could.”

“That _sounds_ like a threat,” Findaráto muses happily. His guard glares; the Old Ghost never wavers.

Curufinwë asks Tyelkormo about it later. “Did you see the Man who attends Ingoldo?”

Tyelkormo looks at him strangely. “I think everyone can, brother.”

“Only Findaráto cannot,” their guard says shortly. “We do not tell him, and neither will you: he has suffered enough.”  

“Any suffering that dupe undergoes, he brought upon himself by inviting it,” Curufinwë says sharply, and the guard falls back, bleeding.

 

~ ~ ~

_Try being grateful._

_Tell Tyelperinquar: “I am glad that I carried you.” Tell Tyelkormo: “I do not regret your coming with us.” Tell Findaráto: “We owe you our lives.”_

Grateful _. What a terrible, pretentious waste of emotion. It just grates, does it not? False and hollow as these halls?_

_“We owe you our lives” – no, you do not. Your lives are your own, and you would have lived them regardless of whether Findaráto had welcomed you into his city or not._

_Anyway. Ignore how the shadows stretch towards you as you practice the words and discard them – they are overeager, that is all. They have always wanted a life of their very own, and even if yours would be their first, they promise they would take the best care of it that they could determine how._

 

~ ~ ~

Beyond the walls of Nargothrond the weather changes. The city’s venturers – its farmers and traders, hunters and herders – report that this is what weather tends to do, _change_ , but those within the city itself pay little mind to such forecasts. One way or another, weather will happen, and paying attention to it will only encourage it, so Nargothrond and its denizens simply go about their business instead.  

And that business is variable. In a certain set of chambers it is unmistakably intimate: punctuated by the rustle of bed-cloths beneath a trembling body, a shaking inhalation. It is the breathing that dissolves into gasps, the shuddering curse beneath a first finger and then a second, the soft wet sounds of rising pleasure. It is the eventual cry that could almost be a name, even though he is utterly, utterly alone.

It is _not_ the last inhalation, the one that could almost be a sob. And even if it were, then that would be nobody’s business. Just like the weather.

His own sticky, shaking fingers and the letter in his fireplace that still has not burned do not count for anything.

 

~ ~ ~

_This is all that anyone can say about love: nothing._

_For love is a road you can only learn by walking, a dance you can only learn by stumbling, a song that did not exist before you began to sing it – with or for or against someone else._

_Love is reaching out with both hands into the darkness, not knowing for certain if anyone is even there, and then feeling both those hands taken, another’s promising that neither of you will ever be alone again._

_But for all its promises, love does not mean those hands will always be there. Love does not mean that those fingers will not hesitate, or shake, or withdraw._

_Maybe the Old Ghost could confirm this, if he ever left Findaráto’s side._

_And perhaps this is all that anyone_ should _say about love: nothing._

 

~ ~ ~

But eventually even Curufinwë sleeps, ignoring the crackling sounds of a letter that he never wrote and never read, a letter that even in the fire never burned.

And when he finally sleeps, Curufinwë dreams of white walls. Not Nargothrond’s walls, but a great fair city ringed by mountains, and that it how he knows he is dreaming, for mountains do not exist. And because mountains do not exist, and this is a dream, there is also no chance that Turukáno, who now stands beside him, could actually be real either.

Because this is a dream, Curufinwë can say things that he would not have said if this were not a dream.

“You are a fool,” he tells this image of Turukáno. “A perfect, beautiful fool.” Curufinwë does not even need to look at this non-existent Turukáno to know what he will see in him: a perfectly statuesque jaw, a perfectly furrowed brow, and perfect hair. “I do not understand why you had to go and follow your dreams. None of the rest of us do. We know better than that.”

This is, of course, a lie. If the rumors are true and Turukáno did disappear because he was told in a dream that he would build a great city, then of course Curufinwë understands. Turukáno would not have been like the rest of their kind and dreamed a foolish dream.

But Curufinwë is not about to go setting precedents like this, letting Turukáno think that just because he is the whetstone for Curufinwë’s heart and mind and tongue, that he will get off easy.

Even though this Turukáno is not real, his ivory-walled city is not real, and the mountains certainly are not real.

“Dreams are dangerous things, you perfect beautiful fool. They promise _happy endings_ and _things make sense_ and all kinds of nonsense like that. Why did you have to go and follow a dream? I thought you knew better, too.”

In his dream, Curufinwë sighs and turns his face away from the city of white walls, the city that cannot really exist and a Turukáno who cannot actually be there. And from the corner of his eye he can see fire rising, and white walls falling, and Turukáno – perfect, beautiful fool that he is – ashen-faced but not running as his non-existent city swallows him whole.

Dragons dot the sky; war-engines the plain. but this is fine: it is only a dream, and dreams are dangerous things.

In his sleep, Curufinwë sighs and turns his face into the pillows, feeling himself and only himself in a bed that is more than great enough for two.

 

~ ~ ~

_Lay down, your sweet and weary head. Night is falling, harder than walls and faster than hopes, and you have come to journey’s end._

_Good night, Nargothrond. Good night._


End file.
